


Hedge Your Bets

by tvgoldfish



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Gen, My WoLs backstory, Sequential Drabbles, has some headcanons about what life is like in ul'dah
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-14 03:48:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29786007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tvgoldfish/pseuds/tvgoldfish
Summary: He replaces the willow tincture on the top shelf, and stops.If he's going to leave, he realizes, he'll have to do it now.He has enough gil to make the next payment, barely enough to eat this month, nothing left over. His work at the apothecary has slowed to a diseased crawl. As Pearl Lane grows more populated, the number of people who can afford any kind of medicine dwindles, and the number of people who’ll deign to walk among the impoverished to reach his shop doesn’t grow either. The interest has piled up, more than the worth of the building, if he can even find someone to buy it. He could sell the pharmacy and every herb and cracked jar in it, and he’d still be drowning in payments- and it's hard to learn to swim in the desert.He’s starting to feel the bloodthirsty stares of the coliseum crowd already, burning on the back of his neck.He’s going to leave.He takes off his apron, sticks all the gil he has in the satchel he uses for gathering herbs, and grabs his broad brimmed sun hat off the hook on the wall.He’s going to do it now.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7





	Hedge Your Bets

**Author's Note:**

> For reference my WoL is a duskwight elezen who moved from the Shroud to Ul'dah with his grandmother when she went to go start a pharmacy.

He has fun playing with the crystal shard, pushing aether in and squeezing his eyes shut at the wind that bursts out in response, lifting his bangs off his forehead.

In the front of the shop, his grandmother argues with another woman.

"He'll have a more stable upbringing here." His grandmother says in her 'Chores. Now.' voice that brooks no argument.

"I know that! Why do you think I asked you to take him in the first place?"

His grandmother has hair that seems to move from white to whiter with age. This second woman is smaller and softer than his grandmother, with hair as red as his.

"It's getting harder and harder for me to come here, mother. I'm just asking that you bring him sometimes to visit. Don't you want to show him the Shroud?"

He pulls a water crystal shard from the bag the woman gave him, fascinated by the feeling of moisture beading between the plane of the crystal and his skin.

He and his grandmother don't leave Ul'dah.

* * *

Looking back, he could tell that his grandmother was a skilled herbalist, but a bad teacher. She didn’t teach so much as demonstrate, and she didn’t demonstrate so much as do the task herself- and frown when he failed to pick up the know-how by osmosis.

Still, she was his teacher, and he learned what she had to teach one way or the other.

* * *

“Fetch the witch hazel,” His grandmother doesn’t look up from her mortar. Felician stares from where he packages the tincture she’s made.I don’t know where it is, he’s about to say.

Then, there’s a dull ache in between his eyes, and he does know.

He stands and walks the shuffling path that his grandmother would take from the counter to the shelves on the walls. In his mind’s eye he is over six fulms tall, with aching joints and a sure grip. In his body he comes in at barely over four fulms, and when he reaches for the bottle it tumbles from his fingertips and hits his shoulder as a rest stop on its crash course with the stone floor.

His grandmother bids him salvage what he can and get the dustpan to carry out what he cannot.

“Foolish boy. We have a step stool." She shakes her head. Felician sweeps pottery shards into the pan. “Use your brain. Think about what you’re doing.”

He was thinking. He’d been thinking that he had fetched the witch hazel from that shelf a thousand and one times, that it was nice that the jar was at eye-level, but lifting his arms to grab it irritated the arthritis in his shoulder.

Cleaning the mess, of course, causes no such discomfort.

* * *

“It’s getting worse.”

Even Felician could tell that much. The uneven gait, the feverish flush. Under the edges of the man’s unseasonably long sleeves Felician could tell that-

“The rash is spreading.”

His grandmother had repurposed one of their window boxes as a step for the front of the counter after Felician pointed out that it was annoying for their lalafellin guests (and annoying for him, more importantly) to be face to face with essentially a wall when they were trying to make a transaction.

Felician goes unnoticed as he replaces the mint in one of the wall mounted drawers. He keeps one ear on the lalafell who stands on the overturned window box, pleading with his grandmother.

“It’s my wife, my wife, she’s sick and she won’t make it much longer. Our children- they need her.”

Felician frowns and closes the drawer. Maybe. But Felician can definitely see the beginning of the red welts on the lalafell’s hands.

His grandmother must see it too. He’d long since stopped hoping that the spectacles perched at the end of her nose were any inclination of declining powers of observation.

“Very well. I’ll accept a promissory note.” She doesn’t question him further. She turns around and pulls one of the antibiotic ointments from the back, then a small blue vial Felician doesn’t recognize off-hand. “Felician, the febrifuge.”

He moves away from the mint drawer and grabs the step ladder to get what she’s asked for. He moves around the counter to deposit one of the small jars on the counter at his grandmother’s elbow.

“I’ll write down the instructions.” His grandmother painstakingly bends below the counter to grab paper and an inkwell.

She sends him off with weeks worth of doses and the instructions for how to use them. He thanks her profusely and practically runs from the pharmacy, the medicine clutched in his hands as though he’s afraid she’ll change his mind and take it back.

She heaves a sigh from her post behind the counter, sounding every bit her age. Felician stops pretending to be busy replacing the herbs and turns to face her.

“He most likely will not return.” It’s her turn to busy her hands, pulling out the rag she uses to wipe the countertop.

Felician couldn’t imagine it either, but he doesn’t think it needs to be said twice.

His grandmother looks straight at him. His back straightens almost unconsciously.

“Felician, we sell medicine.” I already know that, something else that doesn’t need to be said. He grabs the hem of his dalmatica and squeezes it in his fist. “Someday, you’re going to choose between another’s life and your own profit.”

She’s not asking for his choice. She turns back to the counter before she could even possibly catch his stiff nod of acknowledgement.

* * *

He gets the first shooting pain up his thigh as Bertrand tells him his grandmother was found dead after the riots. The combination nearly takes him off his feet. He has to clutch the top of the too-tall counter to keep from collapsing to the floor.

"What?" He grips the edge, hobbling around the counter on legs that suddenly feel like the gelato flesh they purchase for the apothecary sometimes.

"They found 'er when the crowds died down, slashed-" The highlander pales and backtracks. "They're keeping all the unidentified... You know. at Arazneth Ossuary."

His grandmother told him only once that his growth spurt would start gradually, then pick up pace, feeling like someone was boiling his tendons the whole time. A line of fire yanked at his calf. He was a late bloomer, and now it seemed to be happening all at once.

"I'll close down the shop for a bell-" He starts to shelve the packages. He glares at everything that seems to be pitching wildly around him- everything seems to be pitching wildly around him.

"Hold on, lad." Bertrand holds out his hand like he wants to catch Felician by the shoulder, but he's too far away. "I can close down for you, or watch the shop 'til you get back."

He shakes his head. It was his grandmother's first unspoken rule- the shop was closed unless one of them was behind the counter.

He finishes stuffing envelopes- his hands, shockingly, work just as well as always as he spoons the powdered meadow saffron into the pouch. He lines up paper-wrapped parcels, aware of Bertrand’s worried eyes the whole time. Orders for pick up today, he leaves out.

"Lad-"

Done, ready. He's ready.

"Anyone stops by for their order, let them know I'll be back in a bell or two."

Bertrand's face softens in a way that makes Felician clench his jaw. He has to keep from- he has to-

"Will do, lad. Take care on the way."

He lurches out the door, towards the Ossuary.

* * *

When he trips over his words trying to tell the attending priest that he can’t pay for a funeral, he could swear the lalafell almost rolls her eyes. You and every other casualty of the riot, he imagines her saying. But that’s all it is, imagination. His head is spinning.

She tells him his grandmother will most likely be buried in a church yard to the east.

The light in the Ossuary is dim, like the pharmacy. His mouth is filled with a piney, cypress taste and he doesn’t quite manage to tell her that he doesn’t recognize the name of the church.

* * *

"And your grandmother made you aware of her... Obligations?"

His eyebrows twitch against his mounting irritation. This could wait, couldn’t it? Until more than a day after his grandmother’s death? He stops himself from thinking of her, cold in one of the Ossuary's stone holding slots.

No, she hadn't.

"I'm not blind," he says coldly, hoarsely.

The loanshark smiles pityingly, but his pupilless purple eyes are nothing but predatory.

"Well, as you may have known, your grandmother owed me a prodigious amount of gil, in return for helping her to set up her dream pharmacy." His tone is brutal and matter of fact. To Felician he sounds oily, his words leaving a slimy residue like the toad secretions packed away in the tiny cellar. "As the new owner of the property, it will fall to you to repay the money in her stead."

He stares down at the lalafell with dry red eyes. After this godawful growth spurt- the bone deep ache in his leg has only gripped him for half a bell and already he’s sick to death of it- he’ll be twice this man’s height. As is, he's only maybe a fulm and a half taller, but still the moneylender looks unbelievably small, unbelievably far away. He thinks he could crush him and his loan underfoot, if he just took a step forward.

He flicks his eyes to the paper that rests on the counter behind him, and back to the lalafell.

"Normally I would give you a grace period because of your unfortunate loss, but I also lost much in the riots, and I simply can't afford to." He reaches up, pats his elbow consolingly.

His tone is disgustingly assured. Lost much? Really? I don't see where a brick cracked your skull.

"So you understand that you're to pay me the one hundred fifty thousand gil in her stead?"

He’s almost certain his grandmother didn't owe that much. He wishes she'd said anything, told him how much, told him- anything. He looks to the loanshark’s highlander bodyguard, loitering stiffly in the background. It doesn’t matter.

"I understand."

* * *

He stops by on the first day of every moon, like clockwork. He shrinks every time, getting farther and farther away as Felician grows to his adult height and the growing pains fade to the occasional twinge in his limbs.

"Nothing extra this month on the principle?" He tilts his head, his voice conversational.

No, he'd had to get new clothes again, the old ones already outgrown. He says nothing.

"I've noticed that business has been slowing down around here." He examines one of the jars on the lower shelf, and turns back with a wolfish grin.

"The wagers around the bloodsands have been picking up though, and you know everyone loves an underdog. If you ever get sick of running this old pharmacy, you could always try your hand as a gladiator."

He wouldn't last five minutes on the bloodsands, and they both know it. He'd snap like a twig. It's why, after two years, the man still only has the one guard, the aging black haired highlander Felician doesn't know the name of.

"It's going well enough for me." His voice is flat. He keeps a sharp eye on the merchant’s hands, anticipating them flying out, shoving the jar of dried chamomile to the floor.

The loan shark smiles back pleasantly. "Well if it ever gets to be too much for you, just talk to me and I'll set you up a place."

Finally, he slips the bag of gil in his pocket and turns to leave.

Felician watches him go.

* * *

It wasn't common to die on the bloodsands. It would be bad business for a lot of reasons. Legally. In the bars after a bad match the murmurs kicked up like a dust storm; the bleeding-heart Sultana was more than willing to withdraw the Sultanate’s funding if she didn’t approve of the conditions. For entertainment. Only the most brutal of spectators were entertained by watching a pugilist disemboweled by the quick swipe of a gladiator, only the most brutal of gladiators went for the gut, anyway. Money. More importantly, you couldn’t work off a debt if you were dead.

It wasn’t common to die on the bloodsands, but it did happen. On accident or on purpose it was a cost benefit analysis- funerals were expensive, and so were assassinations. So went the teachings of the Order of Nald’thal, for how else were you to appease the twin aspects of wealth and death?

* * *

He walks up to the bookie. She pauses in examining her nails and looks back at him with an eyebrow raised towards her black, slicked back hair.

"Twenty thousand gil on the pugilist for the Lominsan," Felician says. “Five thousand for me.”

The sun-seeker’s eyes are half-lidded, golden and slit-pupiled, and she says nothing when he puts the banknotes on the table, and also says nothing when it’s clear that she’s seen the same sloppy signature, definitely not his, on all of them.

She shuffles them into a condensed pile and sticks them somewhere under the desk. He gives a name for himself and the captain’s name when prompted. On the pugilist, she says, "They are getting quite popular."

He makes a noise of agreement and turns toward the arena. There, in the top row of the stadium are the Lominsan captain and her first mate, a steady looking roegadyn and a sharp-eyed miqote, happily in the middle of getting drunk off their asses. He used to place bets himself, hemorrhaging gil left and right until he hadn't been able to make his minimum payments. Now, he relied on the happy accident of someone asking him to take a bet for them- it wasn’t his fault if they mistook him for a bookie. If he took out a convenience fee on his way to the counter, that was only fair.

Every time he tells himself he’ll just walk away with it, and every time he ends up back at the counter anyway.

He turns his attention to the arena, where the pugilist, a lalafell with close-cropped black hair, ambles onto the sand. They're joined shortly by a highlander woman, armed with a trident.

As the guilds opened to adventurers and more Ala Mhigans made their way inside the walls, the composition of the bloodsands changed. Not just populated largely by swordsmen and pugilists anymore, lancers became commonplace and thaumaturges began to practice their arts for spectacle, not just for the eyes of Nald'thal. The guild fees were waived, and more gladiators poured onto the bloodsands.

Sometimes Felician would look at the thaumaturge's guild, the last to open their doors, and wonder.

He tunes back into the match as the referee calls the start. The pugilist rushes the lancer, following with a lightning fast kick to the back of her knee, and he rubs the back of his leg with his foot absently. The lancer manages a swipe that opens a gash on the pugilist’s arm, but catches a fist in the jaw for her trouble. They untangle- she spits something that’s definitely blood, and could be a tooth, onto the sand.

He keeps his hand down on the counter, doesn’t let it drift to the space in his jaw that’s beginning to ache mysteriously.

Really. He’d snap like a twig out there.

He lingers by the stand until the lancer takes a fist to the gut that brings her down for the count, but doesn’t stay long enough to see her carried out of her sandy bed. He certainly doesn’t stay long enough for the Lominsan’s crew to start wondering what happened to the convenient assistant who took their bets, and where he was with their winnings.

The bookie waves her fingers dismissively. He weaves out of the crowd with a few extra banknotes in his pockets.

* * *

He replaces the willow tincture on the top shelf, and stops.

If he's going to leave, he realizes, he'll have to do it now.

He has enough gil to make the next payment, barely enough to eat this month, nothing left over. His work at the apothecary has slowed to a diseased crawl. As Pearl Lane grows more populated, the number of people who can afford any kind of medicine dwindles, and the number of people who’ll deign to walk among the impoverished to reach his shop doesn’t grow either. The interest has piled up, more than the worth of the building, if he can even find someone to buy it. He could sell the pharmacy and every herb and cracked jar in it, and he’d still be drowning in payments- and it's hard to learn to swim in the desert.

He’s starting to feel the bloodthirsty stares of the coliseum crowd already, burning on the back of his neck.

He’s going to leave.

He takes off his apron, sticks all the gil he has in the satchel he uses for gathering herbs, and grabs his broad brimmed sun hat off the hook on the wall.

He’s going to do it now.

He locks the door behind him as he exits, merging with the crowd in the Sapphire Avenue Exchange. He plans as he cuts through the populated market, vendors shouting their wares on all sides.

He emerges from the swarm outside the doors of the quicksand. The doors open for a white haired man with a knife strapped to his belt and Felician can briefly see inside. The lalafellin pugilist from the match weeks ago is there, standing at the leve desk. Dozens of adventurers in various conditions litter the tables.

He keeps moving, through the Gate of Nald.

“Where are you going?” Calls the familiar voice of a Brass Blade stationed at the entrance, the same routine every time. Though, coming into the city was always worse than leaving.

“Where do you think?” He responds, holding up his worn satchel.

To Limsa Lominsa- different people, different schools of magic, away from Thanalan’s relentless burning sun. Limsa. It was a place you could disappear, he’s heard, whether you wanted to or not.

* * *

He’s been walking for days, and he strongly suspects he isn’t getting any closer to Limsa Lominsa. In fact, he can see the beginning of trees in the distance now, past a tall bridge, and he’s begun to have an inkling that he went entirely the wrong way.

He stops at a small town, camp, hole in the ground, called Drybone, hoping someone there will tell him he’s wrong.

He slips a couple of gil over the counter and the bartender slips a tall tankard of water back. It tastes like lukewarm road dust and feels like sand when it washes through his mouth, but he drinks it anyway.

“On your way to the Shroud?” The bartender asks from across the counter.

Felician fights a groan.

The only way to turn around would send him back through Central Thanalan, if he’s not mistaken- though he can’t say he’s particularly confident in his map-reading skills anymore. It is what it is- the shroud isn’t Limsa, but it isn’t Ul’dah. He has never been interested in seeing his grandmother’s birthplace, but he was never particularly interested in losing teeth to keep her pharmacy either.

He treks on towards the shroud, dry dirt sprouting scrub grass as he goes.

The trees grow closer together, the foliage denser, and the sun less relentless. He can’t say he minds the shade. His sunhat is falling apart, and he doesn’t want to burn.

* * *

It builds as slowly as the heights of the trees, spreads like the shadow of the canopy, pushes against him like the breeze that diffuses through the boughs with empty hands, no grains of sand to pelt at him.

There’s someone there.

He looks around.

There’s no one there.

He feels the pressure of a presence as keenly as he feels his frustration at the indistinguishable trees that surround him.

There’s definitely someone there.

He scowls and scours the underbrush, looking for even the slightest break in the foliage. The forest reminds him of how dimly lit his grandmother always kept the pharmacy. He doesn’t have to squint against the brightness of the desert.

Even without the light to blind him, he sees nothing.

He hears something.

Almost indistinguishable from the rustle of the wind in the trees, a faint chittering. Some kind of squirrel?

Once he’s heard it, he hears it everywhere. And it’s coming from everywhere, pops and clicks and chittering and rustles that seep under the other sounds of the Shroud, a living noise that seems to belong to the forest itself. And with the noise the feeling of being examined, sized up, probed by unseen eyes.

The wind stops. The feeling of being examined eases. The presence he feels recedes, until he’s enveloped in the sensation of walking through a crowded street, surrounded but undisturbed. Part of the flow.

He adjusts the strap of his satchel and looks back over his shoulder, to where the desert has long since vanished.

He presses on.

* * *

He crouches by the water’s edge and reaches for the cattail. The everpresent click-chitter-rustling of the forest turns to displeased hisses. He pulls his hand back. It quiets.

He swears the trees are taunting him. Any time he reaches to pick something the sense of disapproval swells, then quiets as soon as he pulls his hand back. The cattail is his latest attempt- trying to pull up the plant has brought the fastest wave of scorn yet.

“Hey. You. What are you doing?”

Felician feels his own wave of displeasure as he turns towards the voice.

One of the sentries had moved from in front of the rope bridge and marched up to him at the water’s edge.

He stands to face him and ends up still craning his neck to meet the eyes of the other elezen. Eye… holes. He wears a wooden mask with two perfectly round eye holes, a pointed overnose portion, and two curved stripes that run down the temples.

Felician thinks it looks stupid- it gives the same comically shocked impression of a bird viewed from head on- but he decides to keep that to himself.

He gestures towards the cattail. “The root is edible.”

“You can’t pick that.” The sentry’s voice is derisive. “The Elementals won’t suffer any harvesting after what happened.”

“Huh?” Felician doesn’t know what he wants clarified first, so he makes a general noise of inquisition and waits for the guard to choose something to expand on.

“The forest fire.” The sentry scowls at him like he’s being purposefully obtuse. “Even you should know how that would incense the Elementals.”

What the seven hells is your problem, he almost snaps. I’ve never seen you before.

“I’ve just arrived. I wasn’t aware of a forest fire.” His voice sounds bored to his own ears, but he can’t help the irritated way his eyebrow twitches downwards.

“Tch.” He imagines the sentry is glaring at him. He jerks his head in the direction of the rope bridge and the rocky pillars it hangs from. “There are merchants at Camp Tranquil, if something to eat is what you’re looking for.”

If you can afford it, his sneering tone says.

“Great,” Felician says, and heads towards the rickety looking wooden planks.

The sentry trails after him, stopping at his post and watching Felician until he’s climbed to the first platform.

Just like the Brass Blades at the Sapphire Avenue Exchange- just replace the merchant’s stalls with an algae encrusted swamp. Felician snorts and keeps trudging up the bridge.

* * *

“Can you give me directions?”

The chocobo stares at him with somehow more awareness than there is in its owner's guileless green eyes.

I have no idea where I’m going. Felician points down the path in the direction he just came from. “City’s that way.”

He doesn’t mention that the city in question is Ul’dah.

The chocobo keeps staring at him. He tries not to let his discomfort show, even as he eases backwards a few steps. Every time he looks at a chocobo he remembers one of his grandmother’s patients, a caravan assistant who’d gotten attacked by one of the birds. Felician could still picture the bruises on the miqote’s face (he looks at the chocobo’s beak) and the way purple bruises ringed the deep gouges on the miqote’s back (the talons at the end of the chocobo’s legs are plainly visible against the packed earth.) And is he imagining things, or does this bird seem larger and more intimidating than most?

He pointedly looks away and back to the other elezen, who stares ahead absently.

“Ah-” He looks at Felician. “Thank you. Come on, Richard.”

He pats the chocobos shoulder and guides him away, down the path Felician came from, towards the swamp.

* * *

Gelmorra. A subterranean city laid to rest under the Black Shroud. Felician heard his Grandmother mention it, once or twice. In his memory, she sounded wistful, like one of the onlookers at the Coliseum, talking about what they could have done with their last paycheck if they hadn’t blown it on a bad match last week. Or maybe he was the one who felt wistful, thinking about what he could have done if he hadn’t just plunged thigh deep in some kind of sinkhole.

Ow.

He braces his palms on the ground to either side of the hole and uses the leverage to yank himself out, up to his knee. Ow, ow. He must have pulled something in his crotch when the ground beneath his foot had abruptly decided to vacate the premises.

A mumbled string of profanity accompanies his movements as he extracts his shin, then ankle from the void they had plunged into.

The brick that’s visible under the moss that fringes the opening of the hole is what brings the thoughts of Gelmorra to the surface. Only dappled sunlight filters through the canopy above, and none of it permeates into the blackness that swallows his foot. It’s closer to the surface of the forest than he would have assumed, if he really did just punch a hole in the ceiling of the buried city.

“Hello there. Are you alright?”

The sounds of the forest and Felician’s own litany of curses must have covered the sound of the newcomer’s approach. Or maybe he was just quiet.

The profanity jolts to an abrupt halt as Felician finishes maneuvering his foot out of the hole and looks behind him. He sees another elezen standing between the trees, his skin alternatively blending with the shadows of the forest and showing blue where the diffuse light hits him.

“I heard a yelp.” The elezen says. His gaze finds the ragged hole in Felician’s trousers where the edge of the brick shredded the skin of this thigh and nods mostly to himself.

Felician scowls and rubs a matching injury on his face where he’d been caught across the jaw by a low-hanging tree branch. “Huh. Must be another poor idiot out there getting eaten by the forest floor.”

“How kind of them to lead me to you first, then.” He seems to survey the scene, inclining his head thoughtfully and murmuring quietly enough that Felician can’t tell whether he meant for it to be heard. “The ruins have gotten closer to the surface since the Calamity.”

Felician struggles to his feet, feeling his forming bruises all the way.

“Let’s get you to Buscarron’s.” He quits his contemplation of the forest floor and looks back to Felician. “He’ll point you where you want to go.”

* * *

By the time they make it to the sequestered bar, Felician has walked off the majority of his limp. By the time they make it inside and his guide melts back into the scattering of patrons, he’s picked up a walking stick from a merchant outside.

It’s roughly as tall as he is, with mostly smooth wood that curls to form a crook at the end. The elezen saleswoman had told him it was fashioned from a fallen bough of the Guardian Tree, which- whatever the Guardian tree was- he definitely didn’t believe, and that it was a wonderful weapon for a novice conjurer, which he believed enough to buy it off her instead of picking a branch from one of the innumerable, normal trees outside.

That, and the fact that whenever he reached for one, the familiar pop-click-hiss of displeasure rushed to great him.

His guide leaves him with the bartender, who he quickly learns is the Buscarron of Buscarron’s Druthers.

“Another novice adventurer.” He smiles, warm and welcoming, and Felician takes a seat in front of the counter. “Always room for more conjurers. You shouldn’t have much trouble finding a party in need of a healer.”

Felician grunts noncommittally and watches Buscarron setting tankards and a plate of food on the edge of the counter. A hyuran man saunters to the bar, grabs it all, and retreats to a table in the corner. Joining a party wasn’t in his plans. It doesn’t sound as bad as he thought it would though, standing in back while someone else takes the hits.

“Any chance you can point me towards the adventurer’s guild?”

“A good chance, if you stick to the road.” A dirty tankard is deposited on the counter and Buscarron grabs it and puts it somewhere behind the counter. He grabs another one from the shelves behind him, wiping down the handle with a wet rag. “There’s been a lot more Ixal activity up in the Central Shroud, though. There’s a wagon outside heading to Gridania. I’m sure you could hitch a ride.”

There’s no taste of sand or road dirt in the water that he’s served at Buscarron’s Druthers. Though he could be uncharitable and say that it tastes faintly of wet leaves.

He goes where he’s been pointed, down the front steps and out to the wagon where a set of elezen twins sit in stiff silence on the bench and a blond highlander merchant loads the last of his cargo into the back.

He’s pointed north. Along the road, up through the Central Shroud, towards Gridania.

He approaches the Highlander.


End file.
